Friday, September 11, 2015

Opening the Fort Hunter Excavation and our Exhibit at the Kipona Festival in Harrisburg.

It has been a busy but interesting
two weeks for the Section of Archaeology at the State Museum. Last Wednesday,
September 2nd, we opened up our excavation at Fort Hunter and for
Labor Day weekend, we celebrated with an exhibit on the archaeology of City
Island at the Kipona festival in Harrisburg.

The Section of Archaeology enjoys
the break each fall when we return to our Fort Hunter investigation. Normally,
we start on the Wednesday after Labor Day each year by bringing up the field
equipment, clearing away the vegetation from the previous year and laying out
the stakes for the grid. This year the excavation floors were in reasonably
good shape and the walls had not suffered too much but the weeds that had grown
around the perimeter were pretty impressive. The jewel weed was over six feet
tall and the rye grass resisted removal until we dug it out with shovels.

One
of our new volunteers, Paul Rudnick, cut his hand while pulling the rye grass
out from last year’s back-dirt pile.

Thursday, September 3rd, we
got to work in earnest, straightening walls and troweling floors. We have three
main goals this season. One is to investigate the circular feature in the excavation
block east of the icehouse. Based on historical research conducted this spring,
it appears to be the foundation for an octagon shaped smoke house built by Mr.
McAllister in the early 1800’s. Rather than generating smoke inside the
structure (a fire hazard), a stove was housed in a small attachment to the
octagon. Investigations in this feature should confirm our research and add to
our understanding of the McAllister use of the site.

Our second goal is to investigate
the area immediately in front of the original 1786 McAllister stone house. The
folklore surrounding the location of the Fort Hunter blockhouse is that it is
now under this structure. Possibly there are fort period features in this area
so a five by twenty foot trench was begun adjacent to the porch. Only the upper
portion of the “A” horizon has been excavated but there seems to be some kind
of concentration of cut stone, ceramics and bone in arranged in a lineal
pattern.

Concentration of cut stone, ceramics and bone adjacent to the McAllister porch.

The third goal and the one that has
generated some controversy among the staff, is to investigate the icehouse and
determine if it actually functioned to store ice. The staff at Fort Hunter
Mansion refer to it as the icehouse and it has two foot thick walls, common for
this type of building. However, the dimensions of this building, ten feet wide
and fourteen feet long, do not fit some of the historical descriptions. In
addition, the historical icehouse had two floors and is described as between 15
and 20 feet deep. These nagging discrepancies were further agitated last season
when we exposed a drain-like feature emanating from an opening in the rear of
the icehouse wall. This is only two feet below the surface and by all
appearances seems to be a drain but not nearly deep enough if the bottom of the
icehouse was over 15 feet deep. So for this season, we plan to investigate the
drain like feature (Feature 90) and attempt to determine the depth of the icehouse
using a bucket auger.

Adding to the questionable use of
this structure as an icehouse is that early this week while cleaning the floor
along the foundation of the west wall, it appeared that we were going below the
rock foundation. For several seasons, we have been gradually exposing this
foundation wall as we investigated the well and the Late Archaic prehistoric
occupations in this area. If this was an icehouse, we assumed the wall would
continue down ten or fifteen feet. However, by Wednesday of this week, it was clear
that the foundation in the corners of the building extended to at least six
feet below the surface but most of the wall was only about four feet deep. Clearly,
labeling this structure as the icehouse is becoming questionable.

West wall of icehouse exposing the bottom of the foundation wall.

This week we also continued
excavating the drain and confirmed that there was a wooden box fitted into an
excavated trench that sloped towards the cliff.

Drain like feature in the rear of the icehouse

Augering the icehouse floor.

We began augering by pulling up
three of the oak floor boards of the icehouse floor, exposing a layer of soil
approximately 0.5 feet thick (we are measuring in tenths of feet this year
rather than inches) and exposed a tightly placed layer of bricks. The layer of
bricks aligns exactly with the drain to the rear of the structure. After
removing a few bricks, we began drilling the underlying soil but it proved extremely
difficult. Initially, a relatively fine sand was exposed below the bricks. The
soil appeared unconsolidated with angular and rounded pebbles and cobbles. At
approximately two feet below the brick floor, the cobbles made it difficult to
proceed with the auger and we quit for the day. These cobbles could represent a
fill material placed in the icehouse when the function of this structure was no
longer needed; or, more likely they
represent the Pleistocene cobble layer that we exposed in 2012 and essentially
represent the natural soil profile. That being the case, the floor of this
building is only two feet below ground surface making it unlikely to be the
icehouse. However, we are continuing to investigate this structure. We’ll let
you know the results next week.

Finally, our Kipona exhibit at the
Indian Pow Wow on City Island was fun and successful. Our goal is to promote
the contribution and preservation of Pennsylvania archaeology and hopefully
inspire the public to visit our exhibits in the State Museum. We had almost
2000 visitors over the three day event. They were fascinated by the dugout and
especially the stone tools on hand that were used to create it. They were also
frequently surprised that people have been living on the island for well over
8000 years. Among the visitors was former Mayor Stephen Reed. He supported our
excavations on City Island between 1992 and 2004 and we greatly appreciate the
City’s contribution.

Former Mayor Stephen Reed at Kipona 2015

A special visitor to our exhibit.

Also, don't forget to mark your calendar Saturday, November 14, 2015 for the Annual Workshops in Archaeology Program. This year's theme Weed Seeds to Garden Seeds: The Archaeology of Farming in the Keystone State. Check our website for more information.

One Tank Trip

WFMZ-TV 69 from Reading, Pennsylvania visited The State Museum of Pennsylvania on February 8th, 2017. Karin Mallett prepared a feature piece on great places to visit that are one tank of gas from Reading and our gallery was the focus of this visit. Karin interviewed Kurt Carr, Senior Curator and Janet Johnson in the gallery and provide a nice overview of the spectacular exhibits. Please click on the link below and enjoy this glimpse of the museum during this One Tank Trip!
One Tank Trip: Hall of Anthropology and Archaeology

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